tasuki’s blog

As my Ubuntu Edgy (6.10) was not quite cutting edge anymore, I decided to get Hardy Heron.

Upgrade over two skipped releases would be suicidal, so I decided to do a fresh install. I also wanted to preserve my old Edgy… you know — just in case. That involved cutting off half of my system partition to create a new partition. You might expect a horror story now, but in fact it all went flawlessly (I just used gparted, the ext3 got fscked, shrinked to a half without a single glitch, passed fsck again and voila).

Installation of Hardy was provided by a nice graphical installer that didn’t even bother asking questions about my hardware (it just asked me about country and language settings and stuff like that). It recognised my monitor resolution, I installed the proprietary nvidia-glx-legacy drivers with two clicks (yes, it’s not even necessary to touch xorg.conf anymore). I just had to set up the wifi connection manually, because the access point has a hidden ESSID (but all the drivers were already there).

I was amazed how everything works out of the box or almost out of the box. Need to play a movie and don’t have the codec? You get a pop-up asking if you would like to download the codec. You click yes and enter your password, you are all set.

Hardy Heron includes Firefox 3 (beta 5 as of now), which is great, because the speedup over Firefox 2 is rather significant (and it does have some nice new features too). The only sad thing is that Google Toolbar doesn’t work in FF3B5 (yet), but well, I don’t really need to see the pagerank of every page I visit.

With my old 32MB GeForce 2 I never bothered installing Compiz, but as it comes out of the box now, I just had to try it. And whooo it rocks. The cube is amazing and there is also this great “scale windows” thingy, that shows all open windows at once so that you can switch between them. And then there are hundreds of different visual effects…

Gnome now allows repositioning the window toolbar items by drag&drop’ing them. That is the feature I’ve always (secretely) wanted. It’s really useful (as opposed to grouping, which I always (not so secretly) hated).

All I can say is: “Wow“.

PS: I don’t say this often, but I have to say it now: In case you haven’t done so yet — with XP being obsolete and Vista near unusable — this is definitely the best time to switch to Linux. And if you encounter any problems, I’ll be happy to help you with troubleshooting.

Do you know what common sense is?

Common sense is:

• NOT setting fixed height for elements whose actual height can change anytime, and especially not setting this particular height to three elements next to each other, to keep them with the same height (common sense solution is to wrap it all in another element)
• NOT calling your database tables j_aidx_1, j_aidx_2 … j_aidx_n and calling the columns m_1, m_2, m_3, etc; which leads to people writing queries like SELECT a.m_85, a.m_167, b.m_17, b.m_56 FROM j_aidx_5 AS a LEFT JOIN j_aidx_8 AS b ON a.m_103 = b.m_42 WHERE b.m_58 = ‘1′ AND a.12 = ‘0′
• invoking the live server settings as default instead of using testing environment settings as default, because when something goes wrong in the decision process, you don’t want the live server to get fucked up
• NOT having the very same function copied to several different “modules” of the application so as to make it extremely inconvenient to change
• NOT calling your backups “new”, “!new”, “_new”, “____new”, “!!!!!new” etc, especially when each person uses a different flavour of this method
• using a version control system, and if you are unable to do so, calling your backups by date (preferrably in YYYY-MM-DD format, since it sorts itself naturally)
• using either tabs or any amount of spaces for indentation, but keeping it consistent (or at least, for fuck’s sake, keeping it consistent within one file)
• NOT internally calling files for inclusion 1.html, 2.html, 3.html etc., especially when you already went through the hassle of creating nice looking URL’s
• NOT totally breaking your URL’s and titles by adding a lot of random keywords just to game search engines, when that makes your site either unusable or extremely confusing for humans
• using one language (human language, like English or Czech) in your application, or at least avoiding mixing up several languages inside one particular variable or function name (findAllNovinky is just lame function name)

… do you know what frustration is?

As I was planning my journey to Krakow and there was only one reasonable train to take, I worked overtime during the week so that I could leave work earlier on Friday. Well, the train was delayed, so I wouldn’t be able to catch the following train, which meant there was basically no way to get to Krakow. After giving up for a few hours, I realised that I really really wanted to go there and decided to take a night train. So I left home at 9pm again and headed for the train. The journey was quite ok except two things: 1) I had to change trains at 3am and 2) my camera got stolen.

Krakow is a beautiful city and I had several hours to walk through the center (kind of sucks I didn’t have the camera, as at 6:30am the lighting was just perfect). I especially enjoyed the Wawel castle, which provides a nice view of the city and is in itself rather spectacular.

The tournament (European Pair Go Championship) was well organized, and there were free cookies and water (even for visitors such as myself!). By the way, pair go tournaments have an interesting feature that half of the participants are girls.

I spent the day relaxing, playing and taking photos (a friend lent me her camera because she was playing and couldn’t take photos anyway). We spent the evening at juggler’s place, which was a lot of fun… juggler has table football at home, so we spent a lot of time playing that (and the rest of the people played go, of course).

Once again I got very lucky by going somewhere where I really wanted to go after a big obstacle appeared, and once again I’m really glad it went this way. I had a great time, I met lots of people whom I haven’t seen for far too long (spirit (been a while), kotasia (cute new hair), hitech (I finally started reading GEB), gertzu (thanks!), agusia (babusia~~), elusia, michal, iskierka, juggler (thx for saturday evening), vertigo (yeah, ruby, we know), sheena, yapi, shaa (hope the leg is getting better), fajnymis, kamyszyn (ban ‘em all), comboy, sosna (no more photos, I promise), nil, cichacz (dupa!), kabu (xD), grabol and everyone else whose name I forgot to write in here) and I met some other people in person for the very first time (Lothus, and… um, actually, isn’t Lothus enough? )

Edit:
Some photo galleries:
My photo gallery
Official photo page, with links to other galleries

It’s not the end
Not the kingdom come
It is the journey that matters
– Wanderlust by Nightwishes

I think I know why I’ve been happy recently — I found the meaning of life.

And the funny thing is that I found the meaning of life without actually realizing I found it. The trigger to my realization was a video called Music and Life (by Alan Watts) (it’s short enough, I promise).

Zen … does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
Alan Watts — The Way of Zen, pt. 2, ch. 2 (1957)

I think I’m starting to like this Zen thingy.

As it’s the journey that matters, and not the end, being an inquisitive type, I of course started thinking about the end of the journey. And I found out I’m not really scared. When I’m dead, there will simply be void. The same one there was before I was born (or, before I was conscious (btw, this post is not big enough to contain a discussion about abortion)). It’s actually quite consoling… no matter how bad I fuck up, the worst there can be at the end is void.

The only people who have a reason to be afraid of death are followers of various religions that believe in afterlife. Also, life itself is not the ultimate fun for them, as the eternal afterlife is far more important. Oh well, I just couldn’t do without a little trolling, could I?